


a friend in need

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: hide and seek [5]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Childhood Trauma, Disabled Character, F/M, Family, Family Feels, Force Ghost Anakin Skywalker, Force Ghost Obi-Wan Kenobi, Force Ghost(s), Gen, Jakku, Naboo - Freeform, Prequel Trilogy As History, Rey is a Kenobi (Star Wars), Swearing, The Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:55:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26956930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: Long before Poe Dameron and FN-2187 crashland on the surface of Jakku, Hondo Ohnaka stops to refuel and have some basic repairs completed. And there he finds a scavenger girl with a strangely familiar face, and the ghost of his very favourite Jedi enemy.An AU possibility: how Maré might have got off Jakku.
Relationships: Hondo Ohnaka & Rey, Katooni & Hondo Ohnaka, Katooni & Rey, Katooni & Rey's Father, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi & Hondo Ohnaka, Obi-Wan Kenobi/Sabé, Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker, Rey & Anakin Skywalker, Rey & Rey's Father & Rey's Mother (Star Wars), Rey's Father/Rey's Mother (Star Wars)
Series: hide and seek [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1311290
Comments: 28
Kudos: 126





	a friend in need

**Author's Note:**

  * For [venetia_sassy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/venetia_sassy/gifts).



> Venetia_sassy thought it would be fun if Hondo had found Maré/Rey and pulled her off Jakku, and I thought it would be absolutely HILARIOUS, so here we are. Thanks to brynnmclean for the beta!

Jakku was worse than Obi-Wan had expected. He didn’t know what he  _ had _ expected - there had been no time for thought when his son had screamed at him to stop bearing useless witness and act. Sabé’s peaceful, pragmatic boy, standing there with blood in his eyes, the tide tearing at his feet, and a healing scar aching right through his midriff: the thought still made Obi-Wan's heart ache. Kyrie had never asked anything of his father in life or death - Kyrie hadn’t known Obi-Wan’s identity while he still lived, and afterwards Kyrie’s flawless shielding had hampered his ability to change focus and explore many of the perceptive Force disciplines. Obi-Wan had consequently never been able to reach Kyrie the way he could Luke, so their conversations had been few; to find and try to protect Maré was the only request Kyrie had ever made. Obi-Wan had known he would answer Kyrie’s plea whatever the cost.

The cost seemed to be higher than he’d imagined. Maré had been a challenge to find, but in the end he had located her light burning amongst the shadow stains of the battleship graveyards of Jakku. He had hoped that she had found some kind of shelter, perhaps been taken in by some well-meaning couple, or at least been conveyed to an orphanage where Obi-Wan might be able to influence some devotee of the Force into protecting her and returning her to her parents. But Maré at five had found her way only to a scavengers’ village, where she sorted parts and cleaned them under ragged awnings in return for a scrap of safe floorspace to sleep on at night, and bare rations in the daytime. She didn’t even remember her full name, and in her touching faith and untutored power she reminded Obi-Wan strongly of Anakin at his youngest, vulnerable and brave.

She had landed on Jakku in an escape pod, but the most cursory investigation determined that she didn’t remember the pod or the truth of the rumours that said she had been found with a dead Trandoshan spacer, his water rations given up to her. She believed her parents had left her, and that they would return for her; she had enough of a grasp of the Force to see Obi-Wan in her dreams, and sometimes in daylight, and she spoke to him freely. 

She didn’t understand that he wasn’t an imaginary friend, though. Obi-Wan feared it would become harder and harder to reach her conscious mind as she grew into believing such things did not exist.

For now, though, she smiled at him without shadows. Obi-Wan walked alongside her in her dreams, and talked to her about centering herself, about understanding her temper, about survival and faith and the mysteries of the Force. Her dreams still had the landscapes of her childhood, the rolling seas and high cliffs around Xarxas, but their edges grew fuzzy and faded, and the beaches too often turned to the dunes of Jakku. Obi-Wan's time in the creche was long gone, Anakin had been no typical Initiate, and Luke's earliest lessons had come from Owen and Beru: Obi-Wan wasn't sure he knew what to teach a child of Maré's age. But he tried to remember the basic principles and how they were taught to young children, and gave Maré whatever lessons he thought she could manage, whenever she could hear them.

Whenever it was safe to hear them. Unkar Plutt snarled at the child whenever he saw her talking to thin air, and there had been more than one poorly aimed blow, too. Obi-Wan kept his tongue between his teeth and restricted his appearances to moments when Plutt was occupied elsewhere, or when Maré slept. He crouched down beside her while she worked on rusting metal parts, tongue caught between her baby teeth as she scrubbed the dirt away, and told her stories: stories about Jedi, about clones, about Tatooine and Naboo and the galaxy beyond Jakku. But most of all he told her stories about a doctor and a pilot, and a little girl they loved very much.

"It's you, Maré," he said at the end of the story, one day when she didn't recognise her parents' names. She still didn't believe he was real, and Kyrie and Limia themselves were becoming increasingly abstract figures to her. She answered to Rey more readily than to Maré, and more and more Obi-Wan doubted his ability to recall her lost home to her. He feared, too, what might happen to her if he left, and when he asked himself if he could find her again he dared not answer.

"What's me?" Maré answered aloud.

"The little girl in the story. It's you."

"They'll come back for me," Maré said, with a nod. "I know they will."

Obi-Wan swallowed bitter acid down the back of his throat. It must have been a memory alone, since ghosts didn't eat or drink or taste bile in their mouths, but that didn't make it more pleasant. He had tried reaching Kyrie from here; tried Luke, tried Ahsoka, tried Leia. He sensed none of them. The distance alone would have been a formidable obstacle, but the darkness of the fallen Imperial battle fleet made everything harder still. Anakin could reach Obi-Wan, and reach Jakku itself - Maré didn't consciously react to Anakin, but Obi-Wan knew he kept vigil by her on dark nights and in the entrails of ruined ships, sometimes - but he couldn't reach anyone who might be able to help. Luke had, at least temporarily, gone beyond their grasp, and Yoda with him. Ahsoka was walking ways they could not reach. Anakin even tried Leia, the day Obi-Wan admitted to having to nudge Plutt's mind away from slapping a slave collar on Maré, but Leia - wrapped up in grief for her own lost child - couldn't hear him.

All there was to be done was to hold on and wait. Wait until Maré was old enough to get off-planet. Wait until one of them could reach someone who could help her. Wait until Kyrie and Limia's own continuing search reached Jakku.

"That's right," Obi-Wan said, settling down next to her, cross-legged. Maré scrubbed diligently at her work. 

"Tell me another story," Maré said. "Tell me about the sea!"

Maré grouped the sea with Jedi, and ghosts, and angels; she believed in these things, but only as a child does, with faith rather than facts. Obi-Wan had no clearer signal that the memories of the water that had surrounded her childhood home were fading.

He racked his brains for memories of Kamino and the Gungans and Mon Cala, and began to speak.

  
  


Six months later, Maré cobbled together a doll out of some bits and pieces she had kept away from Unkar Plutt’s watchful eye. She grew cunning, Obi-Wan thought, and he knew Kyrie who had learned the Force from sleight of hand and cheating at sabacc would be proud. But this was not how Kyrie would have wanted her to learn, sneaking crumbs from others' meals, hiding water rations and toys. Maré made a wobbly little pilot in Rebel orange, and only ever took it out to look at it at night.

“Like your mother,” Obi-Wan said, heart breaking. 

“Like mama,” Maré whispered, as if she echoed him. And that too was another twist of the knife;  _ mama _ not  _ mamá _ , her Alderaanian vocabulary and accent fading fast without Limia’s reinforcement. Obi-Wan spoke no Alderaanian beyond basic pleasantries, and Maré was slowly learning not to listen when he talked, humiliated into believing he wasn't real by the scavengers who jostled for position around her, mocking her for her  _ imaginary friend _ . 

Once Obi-Wan could have silenced them all with a look. Once -

“Limia,” he said. “Your mother’s name is Limia.”

Maré’s mouth formed the words, but she said nothing aloud.

  
  


“She’s forgetting,” Obi-Wan said to Anakin, following Maré back across the sands. The girl was crouched in the back of a speeder trailer with five or six other scavengers, the proceeds from their day on a wreck carefully loaded on the speeder itself, with Plutt’s enforcer. She bounced on the floor of the trailer with every jolt, and Obi-Wan bit back the impulse to tell her to hold on tightly. Niima Outpost was hours away on foot, and the sun was setting.

“You promised your son you’d find her and watch over her,” Anakin said, with brutal practicality. “If you keep that promise, you did what you can.” He scowled. “You’ll have done better than I did with Ben.”

Obi-Wan let that pass.

“The desert won’t swallow her,” Anakin said, in a softer voice. 

In the speeder trailer, one of the scavengers took out a knife and made a joke about passing the time, his eyes on Maré. Obi-Wan bit back a flare of anger, but Anakin was already there, looming over the man’s shoulder, his presence in the Force carrying the weight of two burning suns.

_ Think twice _ , Anakin hissed into his ear. The scavenger blanched, and curled back into his corner. Maré’s grip on her own tiny knife relaxed slightly.

“Thank you, Anakin,” Obi-Wan said. 

Anakin’s clasp on his shoulder was as real and reassuring as it had been in life. “No problem, Obi-Wan.” There was a short pause. “Kid needs someone to look out for her.”

Obi-Wan swallowed hard. Strange how these gestures stayed with you, even twenty-five years after death.

  
  


Maré grew, and grew, and forgot, and survived. Obi-Wan managed to speak directly to her until she was ten, when Unkar Plutt cut off water supplies to the scavengers in response for some imagined misdemeanour, and she had a run-in with a succulent plant that might have provided her a few crucial drops of water and instead caused her to hallucinate for twelve long hours. After that, she ceased to believe in Obi-Wan when he spoke, and welcomed him only in her dreams. Even then, he felt she only glimpsed him; it was poor comfort that she still smiled with recognition.

She should be growing taller, he worried, stronger, healthier. She had a compact, wiry strength to her already, but she was perceptibly underfed and undersized for her age, and her immunizations were woefully incomplete. She had no meaningful access to medical care, and her Force presence burned like a bonfire without the containment that teaching would have provided. Maré had structure, she had discipline - she pushed herself hard for her own survival - but although Obi-Wan had built on the rudimentary meditation Kyrie had taught her, she no longer knew what it was for. Suffering through scorching days and frozen nights, Maré had weighed up a tradition she no longer understood against her own need for survival, and abandoned meditation. Obi-Wan worried about the consequences; her power grew as she did.

"She's alive," Anakin said insistently, following close behind Obi-Wan. "I don't know why I'm telling you to trust the Force when  _ we are literally one with the Force _ , but -"

Maré was twelve, and moving her things into a ruined AT-AT to create a home independent of Plutt. It could only make her safer than she was now, but the fact that she had to build her own fortress wore hard on Obi-Wan’s heart. She should have been safe, loved, protected - 

"She has you," Anakin said, reading his mind with irritating accuracy. "She has me. Hey, does that make me a great-uncle?"

"Take it up with Kyrie," Obi-Wan suggested.

"Fat chance I have of getting him to listen to  _ me _ ."

They sat on top of the AT-AT and watched as Maré cobbled together her home. Under the light of the setting sun she sat down in the sands and ate her dinner.

The sky turned purple and orange at the horizon. Maré squinted at it, and nodded in silent approval. 

“Well done, Maré,” Obi-Wan said softly. 

He didn’t think she heard him, but she smiled.

“You know, there’s no reason why she can’t get herself off-planet,” Anakin said. “Plenty of spacegoing ships around here, and she’s a sharp little mechanic. She still picks up on some of what you say to her. You could lead her back to Naboo, or at least get her into the sector so she can have a geneprint read done. Fourteen, fifteen - she could do it. It won’t be much longer.”

“I thought of that,” Obi-Wan said. His feet dangled off the edge of the damaged AT-AT casing, and he kept his eyes on his granddaughter’s dark head below. “I think I can at least persuade her to study for it, but - she’s so convinced her parents will come back and find her here, I’m not sure I could get her to move away from Niima Outpost, never mind Jakku.”

Anakin didn’t ask if he was still unable to reach Kyrie. They had had this conversation too many times.

“She does love flight, though,” Obi-Wan sighed. “She takes after her mother there. And certainly not Kyrie.”

Anakin put an arm around his shoulders and gripped tightly. “We’ll get her home,” he said, in a tone which left no room for doubt.

  
  


The worst night came months later, when Maré took a fever from travellers at Niima Outpost. She had been hanging around their ship, asking questions - a quadjumper, Obi-Wan noted, like the ship Limia had been flying when they were hijacked by Imperial remnants; Maré always gravitated towards quadjumpers - and making herself useful. They’d been friendly and cheerful, they’d fed her, and within twelve hours of eating their food Maré was flushed and headachey, stumbling miserably back to the safety of her AT-AT. She had rarely been ill, and seldom injured, and this fever tore at her half-starved frame and left her wracked and weeping on her bed, heaving dry sobs and mumbling desperate pleas for her parents. She neither heard nor saw Obi-Wan, who knelt beside her to try to reassure her, to talk to her in the hope she would hear it as familiar background noise. He could cool the air a little, pull her blankets straight if he worked hard enough, but he couldn’t reach her. He could only listen as she tossed and turned her way through the sunset and into the darkness, and bitterly regret that he hadn’t found some way to reach Kyrie. Kyrie had soaked up every scrap of information about Force healing he could scavenge, had rediscovered old techniques and refashioned whatever hints he could pick up into new methods: if he were here, Maré would be well now. If Maré had had the nutrition and healthcare she should have had, she might never even have fallen sick.

Obi-Wan’s medical knowledge was limited, but this fever seemed serious to his eyes: fast-moving and harsh. Maré’s blankets soaked with sweat, and she cried that she was thirsty but could not hold a cup; Obi-Wan could steady it for her, but that movement exhausted him, and he found himself a mute witness to her misery, with nothing left to do but pray.

It was small comfort that Maré survived the night when he wasn't sure if she would make it through the succeeding days, or if she would be able to provide for herself when she did: she had lost nearly a week's work, and her provisions were low. If Anakin hadn’t pushed her on previous occasions to keep back and hide some small and valuable parts, coaxing her in a whisper,  _ save it for later, keep an ace up your sleeve _ , she might have starved - or been driven into accepting a debt from Unkar Plutt which might lead her the Force only knew where.

Still: there were thin weeks and days, but she lived and returned to scavenging, extremely cautious about the food she accepted but otherwise unharmed. And Obi-Wan continued to hope for a way out, all the more fiercely for having faced the tenuous nature of Maré’s survival. Hope seemed to be all he had left.

Under no other circumstances would the advent of Hondo Ohnaka have been a blessed relief.

He didn’t initially recognise the ship. Hondo’s fortunes had fluctuated over the previous forty years, and Obi-Wan had not kept a close eye on him, preferring not to know what kind of nonsense the old pirate was up to now. But his evening trail after Maré, dragging her scrap, led him into Niima Outpost at the same time as the respectably-sized freighter disgorged its crew, and while Obi-Wan didn’t cast more than a glance at the hoverchair proceeding magisterially through the Outpost or the middle-aged Tholothian walking beside it, he did catch the drawling, dramatic voice, with that distinctive Florrum accent.

“- back in my day, of course, we would never have stooped to this!”

Obi-Wan froze. Insofar as a ghost could freeze.

“No,” said the Tholothian, in a similar Florrum accent. She sounded weary, but affectionately amused. “You would just have stolen the entire continent.”   
  


“My dear,” Hondo Ohnaka said grandiosely, “please, give your aged captain some credit. I would have stolen the planet! Ah, those were the days...”

“Hondo!” Obi-Wan shouted. He barrelled across the outpost, phantom-crashing through stalls and sentients, until he wound up in front of an elderly pirate who couldn’t see him at all. Hondo had only grown more wizened with the years; he still definitely had at least three weapons tucked into the hoverchair, which had originally been sleek and elegant but had grown increasingly baroque over time as Hondo added functions and decorations. He still wore the helmet and goggles, and the goggles at least might be the original; his rich red and black coat was cut to accommodate his hoverchair, and his thin keratin tusks had grown longer.

Of course, he couldn’t see Obi-Wan. But sometimes individuals who weren’t Force sensitive could still pick up on the presence of ghosts: there was some hope. Hondo wasn’t exactly a good person, but he was kind to children, and Kyrie would make him a rich man - well, a richer man - if he returned Maré to her home. And whatever his many failings, he had never given up a Jedi to the Empire.

“Hondo,” Obi-Wan said, hearing a note of pleading in his own voice. “Hondo, my granddaughter is here. She’s not safe. Her name is Maré, she calls herself Rey, please, get her home,  _ please  _ -”

“Monkeyfucking mother of  _ shit _ ,” said the Tholothian, and Obi-Wan jerked his head sideways to see her jaw hanging open as she stared at him. She looked to be in her fifties, perhaps the age Stass Allie had been when she died, and she wore a pirate-red scarf over her scaled skull. Her wide, electric-blue eyes were familiar, and they were also directly focused on Obi-Wan. Not the stall behind him, nor the Dug currently bargaining over a hot meal at it, but Obi-Wan himself. 

“You,” she said, and swallowed hard, and then mouthed:  _ Master Kenobi _ ?

The phrasing triggered a memory: a young initiate from among the group Ahsoka had tried to shepherd to and from Ilum, a trip which would have gone better if they hadn’t been kidnapped along the way. There had been a Tholothian girl who made a particular impression, because she had actually worked with Ohnaka -

“Katooni,” Obi-Wan said. “You’re Katooni.”

Katooni pinched the bridge of her nose.

“My dear,” said Hondo, “I cannot help but notice that you are somewhat perturbed!”

“A ghost walked over my grave,” Katooni said, with beautifully dishonest accuracy. “Look, let’s find whoever sells parts and hires out mechanics here, and then I need to go and… commune with the desert for a bit, boss.”

“Commune with the desert! Well, well.”    
  


“Unkar Plutt,” Obi-Wan said. “He’s the local heavyweight. Maré works for him.”

Katooni let out a deep sigh. “Lead the way, boss.”

Hondo led his ridiculous procession through Niima Outpost at an excruciatingly slow pace, continuing to talk at the top of his voice about how much this wonderful place reminded him of the glories of Florrum, and Obi-Wan fidgeted. He could see Maré, diligently scrubbing away at her haul under the thin shade of an awning, sparing only the quickest of hidden glances for the newcomers; Katooni swept the group of scavengers with her eyes, and immediately, Obi-Wan was pleased to see, picked out Maré.

“The resemblance is distinctive, isn’t it?” Obi-Wan said. 

Katooni cast him an extremely irritable look. “She looks absolutely nothing like you,” she muttered, pretending to pat her pockets in search of something, as if she were talking to herself.

“I think she looks like Sabé,” Obi-Wan said. Anakin had commented on it first, possibly searching for a resemblance to Padmé in a child he might - in a kinder galaxy - have called his great-niece, but Obi-Wan had been keeping his idea of that resemblance close to his chest for a long time. Kyrie looked very much like his mother too, but he had inherited Obi-Wan’s chin and nose; though she had taken the colour of her striking hazel eyes and a certain eagle-like quality to her expressions from Limia, Maré had her grandmother’s bones. Obi-Wan wished they were still concealed by baby fat, but if Maré had ever had a spare ounce of fat on her, it had been scoured away by sickness and exertion.

Katooni grumbled.

Hondo settled into negotiations with Unkar Plutt. Katooni detailed the rest of the entourage to watch him, and ordered someone with the noticeable air of an accountant to keep him in line, and then walked out into the desert. She went straight past Maré, whose eyes followed her between carefully lowered lids.

Katooni walked over the other side of a dune, carefully avoiding any kind of path, wedged herself into a pocket of shade, and said conversationally: “Bleeding, fucking kriffsticks.”   
  
“I’m sure we didn’t teach you that kind of language in the Temple,” Obi-Wan observed, drifting down next to her.

Katooni replied with a string of elegantly phrased Huttese that left Obi-Wan speechless with admiration.

“I’m afraid it’s true,” Obi-Wan said. “I’ve been here for - I’m not sure how long. Since Maré was five or so. Kyrie begged me to find her. But I haven’t been able to reach anyone - Luke, Ahsoka…” He trailed off. “Even Anakin can’t find Luke. And Leia, of course…”

Katooni rubbed her temples and muttered to herself, then passed a hand over her eyes and sat up straight. “Last I heard, Kyrie and Limia were still searching for Maré. It’s been eight and a half years. She’s thirteen in two weeks.”

Obi-Wan, slightly taken aback, blinked. Katooni talked like she knew Kyrie and Limia; Kyrie, in the very, very few conversations they had had, had never mentioned her.

“Your son keeps his mouth shut, huh? He gets that from his mother.” Katooni sighed. “I was Kyrie’s teacher.”

Obi-Wan opened his mouth and shut it again. To the best of his knowledge, Katooni had never even been a padawan, but -

“Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m not a knight, let alone a master. Neither is Kyrie.” Pride coloured her voice. “But he’s one hell of a student, and he’s learned more than I ever taught him. I -” she rubbed her forehead, and sighed again. “He’s what I’ve got. Hondo, and Kyrie, and his wife, and his kid. I was there when she was born. Screaming her head off, as loud as the Light, breathing with the high tide. That’s lucky, on Naboo, did you know? Being born at high tide.”   
  
Obi-Wan shook his head silently. 

“Maré,” Katooni whispered, and was silent for a long moment. She might have been crying, but she wiped her tears away quickly and completely if so. “Okay. What do I need to know?”   
  


“She’s a scavenger and mechanic,” Obi-Wan said. “She’s always lived here. The escape pod broke - she was found with a Trandoshan who gave her all his water. He died before they were found. She’s very brave and very wary, and - I’m not sure she believes in the Force.”   
  
Katooni pinched her nose and shut her eyes. “How does a granddaughter of Obi-Wan Kenobi not believe in the Force? Can’t she see you?”   
  
“She believes I’m a hallucination, or something of that nature. She can still see me in her dreams, but she thinks I am… something of her childhood.” Which has been cut brutally short.

Katooni lay back against the sand and covered her face with her hands. “She thinks you’re her imaginary friend.”   
  
“Katooni,” Obi-Wan said sternly.

“Fuck off,” Katooni said, in a chirpy tone which sounded unnervingly like the bright, sweet, serious child she had once been. Obi-Wan winced. 

“She believes her parents are coming back for her,” he said heavily. “She is… quite convinced.” He swallowed. “She’s forgotten their names. She doesn’t know her own. They call her Rey, and she has… has forgotten that she ever answered to anything else.”

Katooni let her hands drop from her face. “This must have been hell for you,” she said, finally. 

“You can’t imagine.”   
  
“You’re right,” Katooni said. “I can’t.”

She got up, and went back to Hondo.

  
  


Obi-Wan had once been called the Negotiator, but nonetheless he found Katooni impressive. In the space of five minutes she had taken charge of the haggling, acquired a set of new motivators, named a price for the necessary repairs, secured technical assistance, and ensured that Maré was on the crew of mechanics - all while deferring obsequiously to Hondo, who from the narrowing of his beady little eyes found that suspicious, but did not argue with her. Obi-Wan saw that all was in hand, and went instead to watch over Maré, still working the sand out of a negative power coupling.

“It will be all right,” he said to her, even though she wouldn’t be listening. “I will get you home. You’re so close, Maré. It will be all right.” 

Maré looked up, and almost looked directly at him. Obi-Wan’s heart thumped hard, twice. 

He stayed with her while she bargained with Plutt for the price on her haul, and listened with pride as she forced the price a little higher, but not so high that Plutt would resent her, and acquiesced to the freighter work as if it really were a favour. Obi-Wan saw Sabé in her there: Sabé dressed as Queen Amidala, playing the role of shadow queen. And Limia, too: surviving. 

Hondo was watching - Hondo and Katooni - and they were talking, just out of earshot and casual, in a florid dialect of Bocce little spoken in the Western Reaches. Obi-Wan drifted over to listen, and Katooni flicked an extremely rude piece of the clone handsign that had become so popular among the padawans and older initiates at him.

“... so what has you looking like, as you say, a ghost walked over your grave?” Hondo asked, folding his arms.

“Keep a straight face,” Katooni warned. “I have told you one lie, honoured uncle. Of a sort.”   
  
“Viper in my bosom!” Hondo exclaimed, without force.

“Whatever you say is no doubt correct, most beloved of teachers. Do you recall that I trained a youngling on Naboo in the ways of the Force?”

“The son of the hostage! Such a charmingly vicious lady. Of course I remember. Is he not still a most prized pupil?”

“A most prized pupil and a dear friend, who long ago lost his daughter in a treacherous attack by the filthy motherfucking Imperial Remnant.”   
  
Obi-Wan blinked. Katooni had been obliged to drop into Huttese for the swearwords; that particular dialect of Bocce used much more eloquent insults. Just the kind of thing Hondo liked to deliver. Obi-Wan wondered if it was his mother tongue. 

“I recall,” Hondo said, looking almost serious. “A tragic tale.”

“Well, consider the tragedy and strive not to throw things at me, honoured uncle. Some ten years ago I learned the true identity of my pupil’s esteemed father.”

“A fascinating story, no doubt.”   
  
“My pupil bade me keep it the sternest of secrets, for his safety and that of his child.”   
  
Hondo looked deeply intrigued.

Katooni took a breath. “It was your most honoured friend and adversary of the Clone Wars.”   
  
Hondo stared at her. “You are the light of my declining years, sweetest niece, but either I become deaf, or -”

“No, I mean exactly who you think I mean. And he recalls you. His ghost approached you to beg you to save his granddaughter, who is even now arguing with that heartless blob for the price of her day’s travail.”

“His granddaughter,” Hondo repeated, and then said: “You cannot possibly mean - he is here now?”   
  
“Currently standing directly before you, most beloved of teachers, and I think he might be about to cry.”   
  
“Ghosts can’t cry,” Obi-Wan said, in Basic. 

“Bollocks,” Katooni said succinctly, and then explained to Hondo what he had said.

Hondo sat back in his seat, and sighed. There was a suspicious moisture at the corner of his wily eyes, and he blinked hard several times. “My old friend,” he said, in the flowery dialect of Bocce. “I believed you deader than a Tatooine sarlacc.”

“Well you weren’t wrong,” said Obi-Wan. Katooni pinched her nose and relayed this directly.

“How I have missed your piquant sense of humour!” Hondo said chirpily. “Well, well. I am sure your granddaughter is just as sweet-natured as her mother -”   
  
“How many times has Limia arrested you now?” Katooni asked, idly.   
  
“Only two! And as I pointed out to her, as a naval officer, she cannot perform an arrest! Furthermore, all charges were dropped. In any case, we will be delighted, nay, ecstatic, nay, honoured to return Miss Maré to her parents’ loving embrace. But I hope you have some means of convincing her that we are not in fact kidnapping her, for I spent sufficient time negotiating with the late, respected Lady Sabé that I have no desire to do so with her Jedi descendant. She looks as if she bites, and I am naught but an elderly veteran. As you see.” He gestured at his chair.

“You only need that for distances,” Katooni said unhelpfully. “And I have holos which I hope will convince her. If not, I’ll raise a link with Kyrie, somehow. New Republic military channels should get Limia’s attention pretty fast.”   
  


“Beloved niece, I am deeply hurt that you would thus pollute my ship.”   
  
“Most respected of captains, it never hurts to be well in with the authorities.”

“Well,” Obi-Wan said. “Whatever happens - your help is -” he swallowed hard. “ _ Most _ welcome. This is - the closest I have come to being able to bring her home.”   
  
Katooni looked at him, and Obi-Wan knew from the twist of her mouth that she was seeing a time when this would have been an easy problem for him to solve: when he had been a High General of the Galactic Army of the Republic, millions of men at his command, and the fiercest star of the Jedi at his left hand. Cody would have had Maré safe home before you could say _ Open Circle Fleet _ . Anakin at the height of his power would have scooped her up and toted her off-planet without hesitation. Ahsoka would have played hide and seek with her up and down the  _ Negotiator _ ’s corridors all the way back to Naboo.

It was fortunate, perhaps, that years in the Jundland Wastes had taught Obi-Wan humility, and the peace of death had taught him to release his regrets.

Katooni was kind enough to clean up his words before she relayed them.

  
  


Onboard the ship, Obi-Wan stuck close to Maré. Initially, Katooni kept her with the motivators; then she sent off two of the other mechanics to look at the hyperdrive, a second pair to tune up the cooling system, and finally asked Maré for her assistance with Hondo’s hoverchair. 

Maré squinted at her suspiciously. “It runs well, though.”   
  
“We’re going on a beach holiday, and I’d like to be sure it’s properly tuned up for a sandy environment,” Katooni said smoothly. 

“ _ Beach holiday _ ,” Obi-Wan repeated incredulously, suffering from visions of Hondo reclining on a lounger with a cocktail in one hand. Katooni ignored him.

“Isn’t he using it right now?” Maré asked, pushing her hair off her forehead and smearing it with grease.

“He prefers to use a cane onboard ship,” Katooni said. “He can still walk quite comfortably for short distances.” 

“Oh,” Maré said. She folded her arms. “Am I getting paid extra for this?”   
  
“Depends,” Katooni replied. “How much are you charging?”   
  
Maré named an outrageous figure. Katooni narrowed her eyes.

Ten minutes later, when a gentlewoman’s agreement had been arranged and Obi-Wan’s spectral head was pounding with a headache that he was sure was a technical impossibility, Maré started work on Hondo’s hoverchair, which was parked in his private office. Katooni had, wisely, left the door open. 

“Have you heard of the Force?” Katooni said, sitting on the floor to watch Maré work. Maré, under the hoverchair with the smallest hydrospanner in one hand and a torch in the other, grunted. 

“It’s a story.”   
  


“It’s not just a story.” Katooni wiggled her fingers, and several of Maré’s tools danced around the hoverchair. 

Maré wriggled out from under the hoverchair to stare, open-mouthed. “That’s  _ so cool _ ,” she said, sounding her age for once. “What else can you do?”

“Cheat at cards,” Katooni said dryly, “heal cuts and bruises, fight with a lightsaber, jump from the top of tall buildings and land safely at the bottom, see ghosts.”

“A lightsaber?” Maré said, predictably latching onto this point.

“Yup,” Katooni said, and added: “But it’s not here. Thing is, Rey, when I came to Niima Outpost, I noticed a ghost. Tall guy. Greyish hair, short beard, long robes. He said he was your grandfather. He asked me to help you.”

Maré froze. “But -”

“He said you learned to think of him as an imaginary friend,” Katooni said gently, “but he has been by your side for a very long time. And I recognised him, from when I was… your age, actually. He called himself Obi-Wan Kenobi, then.” 

There were no holos of Obi-Wan from the last twenty years of his life: not a single one. Obi-Wan had made sure of it. But an artist’s impression had been done from Luke and Han’s descriptions, and from assorted Wanted posters, and it was this Katooni pulled up on a datapad now. She handed the datapad to Maré, who dropped her tools and grabbed it, drinking in every detail of the picture with impossibly wide eyes.

“The thing is that if you are indeed his granddaughter, and I believe you are, we’ve met before,” Katooni said, after Maré had looked her fill and had lowered the datapad to stare at her. “Obi-Wan Kenobi’s son is strong in the Force, and I was his teacher. I helped deliver his daughter, when she was born. She went missing nine years ago, after her parents’ ship was hijacked. They searched the Western Reaches for her escape pod, but never found it. I’ve been looking, but I… never met anyone who even reminded me of her, Rey, until you.”

Maré was still staring, so hard her eyes were watering.

“Maré,” Obi-Wan whispered, his heart going out to her, and for the first time in years Maré’s lips formed the syllables of her full first name.

“You’ll want proof,” Katooni said, after a long pause. “You’re a practical girl. I like that about you. Give me the datapad?”   
  
Maré handed it over with obvious reluctance, and Katooni opened a password and biometric-protected folder and handed it back.

Obi-Wan glided over to peer over Maré’s shoulder, and flinched as Maré scrolled slowly and disbelievingly through pictures of a young Kyrie studying, Kyrie as a boy playing with Sabé in the surf, Kyrie with Limia after the war on Chandrila, Kyrie and Limia in wedding regalia up to their ankles in the sea, Limia cradling baby Maré, Kyrie crouched over and holding Maré’s tiny pudgy hands as she took unsteady steps… Moments he himself had never witnessed.

Sabé had meant to allow him to be involved in the boy’s life: Obi-Wan remembered their last conversation very well. While there had not been any reason to believe her baby would be Force-sensitive at the time of their conversation, he had known their paths would cross, that Sabé would acknowledge him to their son, that - if Kyrie entered the Temple - he would witness his training, so far as Kyrie chose to take it. They should have had the chance to speak face to face in life, at least. But the war had stolen a great deal from all of them.

The important thing now was to steal Maré back.

“I don’t know if this is real,” Maré whispered, lip trembling, as she let the datapad fall to her lap.

Katooni smiled that warm and sweet smile Obi-Wan remembered from a Tholothian initiate, forty years before. “Search your feelings,” she said, “you know it to be true.” 

When Maré broke down in tears, she broke down on Katooni’s shoulder. 

  
  


The repairs on Hondo’s ship were complete within a day; in that time, Katooni recorded a message for Kyrie and Limia and sent it to them, acquired new clothes for Maré that didn’t have holes in, and took Maré out to her AT-AT home to collect her belongings. Maré clung to her hideous orange speeder the whole way out: Katooni and Hondo, in a special docking station designed for his hoverchair, used the freighter’s space-to-ground tender. 

Obi-Wan stuck by Maré. He could sense her turmoil, the fear of rejection covered over by a thin veneer of resolution, and he could also sense that she was searching for him with her mind. Blindly, uneasily, without the straightforward relaxed pull on the Force that she had used as a child who didn’t know what she was doing was impossible, but she was reaching out for him, and he would be there.

“What an impressive little fortress!” Hondo said when they arrived. The best thing about him was that he probably meant it. Obi-Wan looked again at the hulk of ruined Imperial heavy artillery that his granddaughter had been living in, and found it piteous. “My old friend must be proud of so resourceful a granddaughter.”

“I am,” Obi-Wan said. Katooni smiled, and repeated it aloud. Maré blushed.

It didn't take very long to pack up Maré's life. Her belongings fit in a single duffel bag, excepting the scrap she had kept saved for a rough patch ("Good business sense!" said Hondo approvingly) and the speeder. Maré meant to sell both before she left - unspoken in her calculations was the idea that a young girl off-planet was better off with a store of credits than a speeder she might not be able to maintain. In the end, the sun was setting by the time everything was packed, and Maré watched the sun lower over the horizon much as she once had when she arrived. 

She bit her lip hard, and glanced at Katooni, leaning against the speeder and waiting with that patience that Obi-Wan could now see had been passed to Kyrie: steadfast Jedi of the shadows, hiding in plain sight. 

“If you’re  _ lying _ to me,” Maré said, gripping her child-sized staff tightly. 

“I promise you she isn’t, my dear,” Obi-Wan said.

“I’m not,” Katooni said, and then smiled. “I wouldn’t dare. You take after your mother so much.”

“But if I find out you are,” Maré said, very menacingly for a thirteen-year-old.

Katooni spread her arms. “Then kill me,” she said, with a flash of Hondo’s bravado. 

Maré sniffed, and kept a white-knuckled grip on her staff.

  
  


They didn't take off until Katooni had received a reply from Kyrie: an extravagant data package to send privately all the way to the other side of the galaxy, not just a message for Katooni confirming receipt of her message and agreeing to the suggested rendez-vous point, but multiple private messages for Maré, to be opened when she felt up to it. Maré watched the first one, browsed through the others - neatly labelled: memories of her curtailed childhood, recordings of Limia speaking Alderaanian and her mother tongue llonés, 3-D holorealities of Xarxas - and then stopped, clutching the datapad close. Obi-Wan felt her wavering on the edge of tears, and laid spectral hands on her shoulders. 

"They love you very, very much," he said to her. 

"I know," Maré choked out. "I feel it." She blinked suddenly and sharply, looking stunned.

"It's all right," Katooni said. "I heard him too." She offered Maré her hand. "Come and watch us take off. And then I'll teach you how to meditate."

"How to what?"

"It'll help you keep your mind clear and see your grandfather better," Katooni replied, leading Maré to a window seat and encouraging her to sit down near Hondo, who had his hands folded over the head of his extravagant cane and was watching Maré beadily. Katooni sat down on her other side, and together they watched as Jakku's surface drifted away, first slowly and then very fast.

Maré trembled.

"No need to worry!" Hondo said cheerfully. "You are perfectly safe with me! Why, ask Nina here. When she was your age I rescued her and her friends from a stricken Jedi ship as they tried to seek crystals for their lightsabers!"

"Funny," Katooni said, mild and amused. "That's not quite how I remember it."

"Ah, you were young, my dear. But you put on a most impressive acrobatic display as thanks for your rescue. I have seldom been so entertained!"

"Wonder what Ahsoka would have to say to that," Katooni said. Maré watched them, wary but interested, and no longer shaking.

"Such a wonderfully forthright lady, even in her more tender years. But it was then I had the privilege of seeing you forge your first lightsaber, Nina."

"That much is true at least." Katooni was smiling.

"I was so shocked, when you came seeking sanctuary with me against the Empire! But those were dark days."

"Also true," Katooni said, and glanced sideways at Maré. "Did you know your parents fought the Empire, Rey? They're real heroes."

"I recognise the true steel in them," Hondo agreed. "I believe like calls to like."

"You old fraud," Katooni said affectionately. "Would you like to meditate now, Maré, or would you rather wait and watch the stars for a bit?"

"Stars," Maré whispered, her eyes glittering too brightly. She had the little orange-suited doll she'd made in her hands, and was holding on tightly.

  
  


Maré quickly became the crew’s mascot. Obi-Wan wasn’t sure if it was her innate fierceness, her determination to chip in and help, or the fact that she had very obviously been deprived of a normal childhood that did it. But whatever it was, the crew took to feeding her sweets at inappropriate hours of the day and teaching her knife tricks that made Obi-Wan grateful his son was Naboo and appreciated a good blade himself, showing her how to cheat at various games, how to handle the engines and navigate. Hondo made a particular pet of her, partly so he could tell her outrageous stories ( “- your grandfather even trusted me to deliver desperately needed supplies to his student on Onderon! Of course I was only too happy to be of assistance, those were the days when Miss Tano was young enough to need a helping hand -“) but not, Obi-Wan thought, entirely for that reason. Sometimes he looked at Maré like he was seeing someone else. Once, after telling Maré a goodnight story that consisted of a highly edited version of their encounter on Felucia - Obi-Wan had given up on doing more than complaining at intervals when Hondo departed dramatically from the facts, and Katooni refused to intervene - he shooed Maré off to her little cabin, sat back in his chair and sighed, and said to empty air: “My old friend.”

“I suppose we are friends,” Obi-Wan said with weary warmth, knowing Hondo could not hear him.

“So many old friends who should have met their grandchildren,” Hondo murmured. “So many young Jedi who should have known a kinder fate.” 

Obi-Wan opened his mouth and shut it again. Hondo leaned back into the comfortable depths of his chair, and let his eyes drift shut. 

  
  


It was three weeks’ flight to Iloh, the resort planet that had been Hondo and Katooni’s original destination, and where Kyrie and Limia now planned to meet their daughter. Maré spent most of it trying to learn how to meditate and touch the Force. She had once had the fundamentals, but they had long been buried under the necessities of survival on Jakku, and were difficult to resurrect. Maré had learned to jump at the slightest sound, to focus on the tiniest detail that might be a threat, to sleep with one eye open. It was consequently difficult for her to empty her mind and leave herself open to the will of the Force, and as with everything she found difficult, she got frustrated. None of this was made any easier by her very real fears about what her life would be like from now on; Kyrie and Limia sent her short messages, simple and easy to digest, to try to reassure her, but nothing could be quite convincing to Maré’s uneasy state of mind.

It would have been small comfort to her - had Obi-Wan been able to tell her - that Kyrie would be panicking too. It didn't show in his messages. Sabé had raised a good man, but her determination to keep Kyrie safe and hidden also meant that he kept an extremely tight lid on his emotions.

“I don’t understand why it doesn’t work,” Maré wailed one evening, shaking out a cramp in her foot.

“Every Jedi meditates differently,” Katooni said. She had her eyes shut and her toes tucked on top of her knees, and was cutting, shuffling and dealing sabacc cards with practised movements that didn’t waver as she spoke. “We’ll find a way that works for you.” 

“I used to do this,” Maré grumbled. “I remember I  _ used _ to do this.”

“What makes you feel peaceful?” Katooni asked. “Where do you relax?”

“Nowhere,” Maré said snidely, reminding Obi-Wan forcibly of himself as a teenager. “Ever. It’s not safe.”

Katooni half-opened one eye. “It’s a lot to adjust to,” she said, “but you are safe here, and you will be safe with your parents.”

“I wasn’t before,” Maré blurted, and then bit her lip hard. Obi-Wan winced.

“Safe is always relative,” Katooni said calmly. “Maybe I should have said protected. Your parents fought to the death to buy you time to escape.”

Maré fell silent. 

“You said you saw your grandfather in your dreams,” Katooni said. “Why not try looking for him again?”

“You can’t decide what you dream.”

“Not with that attitude, no.”

Maré, still sitting on the floor, folded her hands around her feet and pressed her mouth against her knees. After a moment, she rested her chin on top of her knees and volunteered: “What if I get lost?”

Katooni slid the cards into a single deck and pocketed them, then unfolded her legs and stretched them out carefully. Finally, she opened both eyes. “Follow your heart,” she said, leaning over to tap Maré gently on the forehead. “It will bring you home.”

  
  


That night Maré struggled to sleep. Obi-Wan, who usually didn't keep too close a watch on her at night, stayed nearby and watched her toss, turn, squinch her eyes shut, and shove her head under the pillow in an attempt to find rest. Eventually she got up and wandered around her cabin restlessly, picking up things and putting them down again, staring out of her tiny porthole, taking up the doll that wore Limia's wartime uniform and running her fingers over the clumsy stitching. Her meagre belongings had fit easily into the cabin, including the credits, neatly squirrelled away in hiding places even Hondo would struggle to find. Obi-Wan watched as she sat back down on her bed with a thump, and reached for the X-wing pilot's helmet she had brought with her. She fitted it over her head and slid the visor down, and sat back cross-legged like she used to do outside her AT-AT. Obi-Wan held his breath and waited; when her hands went loose in her lap and her breathing evened out, he closed his own phantom eyes and followed the blazing trail of his granddaughter's Force presence. 

When he opened his eyes, he was sitting in the rear gunner's seat of a T-47 airspeeder, retrofitted for a brutally cold climate. He knew without turning around, that Maré was sitting in the pilot's seat.

"Who was telling you about Hoth?" he asked.

"Is this a dream or a vision?" Maré demanded.

"The two have a lot in common." Obi-Wan twisted round to smile at her. "Hello, Maré."

Maré looked uneasy. She bit her lip hard and mumbled.

"Or Rey, if you prefer," Obi-Wan said gently. 

Maré nodded, and looked down at her hands. "Nina told me about Hoth," she volunteered, and Obi-Wan remembered abruptly that Maré wasn't the only one renamed by circumstance. Katooni had taken and shed a thousand names in her long years of outrunning the Empire. "I was asking how Luke Skywalker became a Jedi. Is this Hoth?"

Obi-Wan peered out the windows and saw an uninterrupted snowscape. "It could be. This is where I first managed to appear to him."

"When he was flying?"

"Actually," Obi-Wan said, "he'd just crashed."

Maré didn't laugh as he had intended her to. She hooked one arm around the headrest and chewed the opposite thumb.

"You've always been real, then," she said after a long pause. "You've always been there."

"Since you were five," Obi-Wan confirmed. "Your father - I appeared to Kyrie on your fifth birthday. He and your mother had - well - they were in the process of exhausting all conventional means of finding you, with no success. He begged me to find you and keep you safe."

_ Do something! _ Kyrie screamed in his memory, as he had done for the last nine years.  _ Try! _

Maybe Maré heard some echo of it. She looked on him a little more kindly.

"I found you," Obi-Wan said slowly, "but I couldn't tell where you were, nor could I reach anyone to lead them to you. So I stayed beside you and… well… did my best."

Maré chewed her thumb harder, scowling. "All the time?"

"Not every minute," Obi-Wan assured her. "I needed to rest and you deserved privacy."

"Good," Maré said, mutinously.

"When Hondo landed at Niima Outpost -" Obi-Wan cleared his throat hard. "I thought it was the answer to a prayer. He can't hear me, but Katooni can."

"Is she telling me the truth?" Maré demanded.

"Yes," Obi-Wan said, without hesitation.

"Is  _ he _ telling me the truth?"

"He likes to exaggerate stories to make himself look like a hero," Obi-Wan said. "He is deeply mercenary, incredibly annoying, and he and I were not always on the same side. But he is a very brave man, and for many years now he has been a friend to the Jedi."

"Yes or no would have done," said Maré. Obi-Wan heard Limia's plain speaking in her voice, and smiled.

"I have seen him set his band of pirates on a Sith lord who had fought off whole armies before," Obi-Wan said, almost affectionately. "Darth Maul called him insolent. Hondo said that, as a pirate, he didn't know the meaning of the word."

Maré smiled briefly, but she was still chewing on her thumb. "Why couldn't I hear you?"

"You were too busy surviving to trust in hallucinations of an old man like me," Obi-Wan said gently, heartsore.

Maré's face fell. "I thought you weren't real," she murmured, and let her hands fall to her lap, cheek pressing into the headrest. "I'm sorry."

Obi-Wan dared to brush a loose strand of hair off her face. "There's nothing to be sorry for, my dear."

Maré was silent for several long moments. "Will you be there when I wake up?" she asked eventually. "What about when I find my parents? I don't know if they'll like me. I don't think I'm… I don't know."

Exposure to popular culture was probably important to help Maré reintegrate to life off Jakku, but it was also clearly giving her an inferiority complex. Bizarrely, she had had more confidence on Jakku.

"Your parents love you very much," Obi-Wan said firmly. "They will love you for your courage, and your resilience, and your kindness. And one day you will not need me, but I will stay with you while you do."

"Okay," Maré whispered. "Okay."

She fell silent, leaning into the scratched and peeling upholstery of the pilot's seat. "I used to dream of - of a place surrounded by the sea," she said, after a while. "High cliffs. Green grass. Do you think that was Xarxas?"

She mangled the name. Obi-Wan corrected her, gently. 

"I don't know," he answered. "It might have been." 

  
  


The next day Maré helped with some maintenance, learned how to make pancakes, practised reading with the ship’s navigator - she had been starting to sound out words when she had been lost, but had never retained more than the ability to identify letters and pick out blocks of Aurebesh relevant to scavenging; the navigator was teaching her to read planets-first - and played a game of dejarik with Hondo, who cheated scandalously to let her win, before sitting down to meditate. This time she brought the helmet with her.

“Does that help?” Katooni asked, interested.

“Maybe,” Maré said cautiously. “Am I allowed?”

“Go ahead,” Katooni said. “Knock yourself out. It can’t hurt.”

Maré settled it on her head.

“I used to use a candle flame,” Katooni said. “Or a little lamp, that glowed different colours.”

“I used to sit and watch the sunset,” Maré said, crossing her legs. Properly fed, and exercising safely instead of crashing around Imperial star destroyers with an abseiling harness and oversized gloves, she was building strength rapidly. They were hampered by the relatively close quarters of Hondo’s ship, but one of Hondo’s guards trained with Maré on staff work, and Katooni had started teaching her basic flexibility and bodyweight exercises, of the kind once used to build initiates’ strength. The Force only took you so far.

“Mm?”

“Outside the AT-AT where I lived.” Maré settled into her stance, visibly more comfortable than she had been before. Her dream, Obi-Wan thought, had been the end point of a lot of incremental progress. “It was never the same, but always the same.”

“That’s an interesting point of view,” Katooni said. “Why not keep that in mind when you meditate?”

He could almost see Maré latching onto the thought, turning it over in her head, turning it into a focus.

“You were a great loss to the Order,” Obi-Wan observed, impressed. “You would have been a fine teaching knight.”

“And instead I’m alive,” Katooni said, dry and precise. 

“Shut up, both of you, I’m concentrating,” Maré said. Katooni laughed, and Obi-Wan smiled.

  
  


Maré grew increasingly jittery as the days slid past. Katooni kept her occupied, and Kyrie and Limia were still sending messages, but Maré's moments of feeling grounded and confident grew fewer and further between. She looked out for Obi-Wan in a way she hadn't since she was very small, and though he found it a welcome relief that she once again felt able to reach out to him, he worried about her. Hondo's ship could have supported a live transmission to Kyrie's and Limia's at this distance, but when Katooni floated the idea Maré was so hesitant and nervous that Katooni let it drop. Hondo's guards taught her to fire a blaster in the cargo bay, and Hondo himself told stories of Captain Ohnaka's Greatest Scams, Galactic Civil War Edition until Maré was yawning and exhausted, but she still struggled to sleep, held back by some unnamed fear. Katooni sat and talked with her for a while - like Anakin as a boy, Maré had learned to hide fear as a vulnerability that would cause others to prey on her, but unlike Anakin, she could be coaxed into talking about it - but still, when the lights were turned off, she lay in bed for long hours, accompanied only by the darkness and the rumble of the engines. She didn’t speak, and Obi-Wan kept quiet; but when she finally drifted into exhaustion, he followed her into her dreams, and found her there.

He felt as if the world had slipped sideways on its axis when he finally arrived. Maré was standing in the middle of Theed on Naboo. Not a vision of Theed, nor yet a memory: something Maré had very clearly built from pictures and 3-D tours put up online by Naboo’s tourist board. None of the people moved.

Obi-Wan shuddered. At least she hadn’t found any of the many saccharine or ominous tributes to Padmé, following the cortège of the Last Free Queen of the Naboo. That would have been too much.

Maré was sitting on the steps of an enormous, elaborate fountain, her elbows wrapped around her knees, and her chin resting on top of both.

“Interesting choice,” Obi-Wan observed. “I didn’t know you knew much about Naboo.”

“I looked it up on the holonet,” Maré said.

That accounted for Theed. Maré was slowly learning to read, and if someone had helped her spell Naboo, she could have typed that into the search engine. It was no surprise she had found pictures of the capital city, or that she had replicated it with such exactness. The people didn't move, but the buildings had been stitched together with perfect logic. Obi-Wan could walk all the way to the palace if he felt like torturing himself.

“The rest of Naboo is not very much like this,” he said. “There are four human-occupied continents, in addition to extensive Gungan territories, mostly underwater. No deserts that I know of, although one of the moons does have extensive scrub desert. It’s a popular adventure holiday destination - or it used to be.”

Maré said nothing. 

“Xarxas is in the north-west,” Obi-Wan continued. “It’s a great deal wilder. Less… formal and elaborate.”

In some ways, he knew, it was just as formal. But the formality was a kind Maré would understand easily: blood debts and words of honour were not strange to her, though oaths were more often broken than kept in Niima Outpost. Padmé’s meticulous protocol and intricate outfits would have driven Maré mad, but the child queens Padmé and Sabé had been would have recognised Maré’s self-reliance and tight control.

It was strange that Maré hadn’t dreamed of Xarxas. Kyrie had sent her pictures and video, Obi-Wan knew; of the beaches and cliffs and forests, and even underwater into the local Gungan town. Maré had watched them. He knew it, because she’d told Hondo that she had never seen so much water in her life.

Obi-Wan sat down next to her on the steps of the fountain and thought. And then he sensed a familiar presence, and so did Maré; far more perceptive than her father, she lifted her head and stared.

“What’s that,” she said, inching closer to Obi-Wan. “ _ Who’s _ that?” 

She got to her feet, ready to fight. Obi-Wan put a hand to her wrist, though he thought secretly that Anakin would be pleased and impressed.

“A dear friend of mine,” he said. “He was married to your grandmother’s best friend, and your father is close to his son. He watched over you with me sometimes.”

Obi-Wan hadn’t seen Anakin since Hondo had landed on Jakku, but that was no surprise. Anakin was still intermittently searching the galaxy for Luke and trying to reach Ben, and he would only have come if Obi-Wan himself had been distressed.

“There,” Maré said. Obi-Wan followed her gaze, and saw Anakin picking his way through the city, robes and all, looking at everything with a critical eye. Assuming all these pictures were recent, Theed had changed little in fifty years. The Naboo had preferred to preserve their pre-war glory, and forget Palpatine.

“You like the look of Theed?” Anakin said dubiously, when he was close enough to talk. “I always thought it was stuffy.”

Maré folded her arms and hunched her shoulders.

“I mean,” Anakin said, “no offence if you  _ do _ .”

Maré scowled at him under beetling eyebrows, and then said: “I don’t. Who are you?”

“Call me Anakin,” Anakin said, with a slight softening to the arrogant line of his mouth. “What are you called?”

“Rey,” Maré said, and then added, with a flicker-quick glance at Obi-Wan: “Or Maré.”

“You have a perfect right to your nickname,” Obi-Wan said mildly.

“Duchess Satine used to call him  _ Obi _ ,” Anakin said, with palpable mischief. Obi-Wan ignored Maré’s curious look with dignity: Maré would probably hear about the Kryzes eventually - Kyrie had only mentioned Korkie once, and he had been particularly annoyed with Obi-Wan at the time, but he clearly knew of them - but Obi-Wan didn’t need to rise to Anakin’s bait.

“As a child, Anakin preferred to be called Ani,” Obi-Wan said instead.

“Ani,” Maré repeated, and squinted directly at Anakin, who looked slightly disconcerted. He’d never actually held a conversation with her before, and watched over her rarely - only when Obi-Wan felt serious danger threatened, and he had no strength left to stay with her. “You look like an Ani. It suits you.”

Anakin gave her a bright, surprised smile. “Your grandfather liked Anakin.” He winked. “More syllables to disapprove of me with.”

Maré looked unimpressed.

“Why Theed, anyway?” Anakin said, changing the subject with alacrity. “Boring as hell.”

Maré shrugged. “It came up when I looked for Naboo.”

Anakin held a hand out to her. “I think you would like the Lake Country better.”

Maré gave him a hugely suspicious look, and then looked back at Obi-Wan. “In the stories they always said - don’t follow people in dreams.”

Obi-Wan smiled at her. “Trust your feelings, Rey.”

Anakin looked rather more pleased than not by her hesitation. “It’s good to be careful.” He smiled. “My mother wasn’t strong in the Force that I know of, but she used to ask me - what does your heart tell you?”

“Shmi Skywalker was wise,” Obi-Wan murmured. Anakin’s whole face softened.

Maré looked between them. “If this is a trap,” she said.

“You know what your grandfather and I used to do with traps?” Anakin said, with the lightning flash of his wildest smile.

“What?”

“Spring them.”

Obi-Wan laughed.

Maré put her hand into his, and the two of them vanished. It needed very little thought for Obi-Wan to follow them to the Lake Country.

They were not at Varykino. There was more to the Lake Country than Varykino, and besides, Anakin offered Padmé’s shade a kind of painful respect, and gave assiduous space to beloved places and memories he felt he no longer had any right to claim. He would not have conjured up a memory of her home unless Luke (or even less likely, Leia) had asked him. But the rolling meadows and deep cool lakes of the Lake Country southeast of Theed were still lovely. Anakin and Maré sat now beneath a tree at the lakeside, engaged in a detailed - and clearly informed - discussion of the schematics of Imperial star destroyers. Maré was drawing, with sure strokes of a twig, the lines of a reactor tower she had stripped for parts.

“Of course,” Obi-Wan said, “none of them are all that different from what Republic destroyers used to be.”

“The old-gen ones were Republic cruisers,” Anakin said absently. “Nothing really changed. Just a lick of paint.” His face darkened. “That’s one reason why it was so easy for him, I suppose.”

“Who?”

“Emperor Palpatine,” Anakin said, “who used to be Chancellor Palpatine.” He took up a separate twig, and made a few slight corrections to Maré’s diagram. “Don’t trust men who say they have no wish to be masters, but gather power after power into their hands.”

Maré sunk her teeth into her lower lip.

“It’s all right,” Obi-Wan said, sitting down next to her. “Anakin killed him, and Leia ruined his legacy.”

Pride suffused Anakin’s face, but he said nothing. 

“Oh,” Maré said, softly.

“Your mother taught you to call her  _ Tía Leia _ , I believe,” Obi-Wan said. “It means ‘aunt’. Limia is Alderaanian, like Leia.”

“She said - I mean, in her message - she was  _ llonésa _ .” Maré’s tongue curled around the word easily: she had a quick ear for language, luckily. 

“Quite,” Obi-Wan said. “She was born in the Llóna Mountains, on Alderaan. The  _ llonés _ have a very strong cultural identity.”

“Oh,” Maré repeated.

There was a long pause, and then Anakin - who had drawn half a star destroyer on the lakeshore - chucked his twig aside, sat back, and said: “Why don’t you tell us what you’re scared of?”

“Nothing,” Maré said defiantly.

“Liar,” Anakin said, eyes closed. 

Maré leapt to her feet. Obi-Wan bit back a sigh and tugged her back down. 

“Anakin was not very tactful,” he said, “But Maré - it’s important to acknowledge your fears, in truth and in full. It decreases their power over you.”

Maré settled, slowly and grumpily, onto the ground. “It wasn’t like that on Jakku.”

“I know,” Obi-Wan said. “On Jakku, you were not aware of the power you possess. Your feelings, unharnessed and uncontrolled, could upend the desert, or hurt those around you.”

Maré looked alarmed.

“So be honest about what you’re scared of,” Anakin said more gently.

There was a long silence, and then Maré mumbled: “It’s all so fancy. And I can’t even  _ swim _ .”

Obi-Wan considered this for several moments.

“I couldn’t swim until I was ten or so,” Anakin said. “That’s normal.”

“You sank to the bottom of the pool and Kit Fisto had to fish you out,” Obi-Wan remarked. “The next morning I found my first grey hairs. Rey, your father taught your mother to swim; he will not expect you to know how as if by magic. Neither of them will expect you to be anything but yourself.”

“But what if they don’t like me?” Maré said, fidgeting. “I was pretty - I could take care of myself on Jakku. But I don’t know - I mean, fancy stuff - like, what did you call it, Theed -“

“Nobody loves anyone else for their table manners,” Anakin said pragmatically.

“Luckily for you,” Obi-Wan observed. “Rey, your parents will be proud of you. They are proud of you; remember the message they sent you?”

“I know, but,” Maré said, and squirmed. “In the holos and things… I don’t have all the nice manners, or the - the style, and I don’t know how kids my age are supposed to - supposed to talk to each other…”

She trailed off. Obi-Wan considered telling Katooni to ban her from watching teen dramas.

“Oh,  _ those _ ,” Anakin said, immediately much more cheerful. “Those are rubbish. You should have seen the ones we got during the war. Anyone would think Jedi Knights were, I don’t know, warrior hermits just waiting to be seduced, only to walk away and do our stern duty.”

“Wasn’t that  _ Warriors of the Galaxy _ ?” Obi-Wan said. “You made me watch all of that. Twice.”

“It was a classic! Rex was a fan. Anyway, it was all rubbish. Those things are rubbish, Rey, it’s just what looks good. Focus on what’s real.”

Maré digested this.

“Should I watch  _ Warriors of the Galaxy _ ?” she said eventually.

Obi-Wan glared at Anakin. A lot of pre-Imperial entertainment had resurfaced after Palpatine had fallen, bootleg copies appearing on the holonet from well-hidden hard drives and personal stores, and  _ Warriors of the Galaxy  _ had been rebooted a few years after Endor with the thinly disguised hero Lucas. None of it, remake or original, was age-appropriate  _ at all. _

“Um,” Anakin said. “Maybe when you’re older.” His face brightened. “You might like  _ Heroes of the Republic _ , though!”

Maré murmured the name, committing it to memory, and leaned her head into Obi-Wan’s side.

“It will be all right,” he said to her, putting an arm around her shoulders. “Trust the Force. It will be all right.”

  
  


Maré was mostly calmer for the last few days of their journey, and the descent to Iloh fascinated her. Iloh maintained docking stations in low atmosphere rather than having spaceports on the surface, and Maré had never seen anything like it before. Hondo’s chief pilot, a particular fan of Maré’s who kept trying out new sweets with her and let her into the cockpit whenever she wanted, allowed her to sit in the co-pilot’s seat while he docked and told her all about other docking stations he had visited, some of them more legally than others. Katooni piloted the tender down to the planet’s surface, and Maré sat on the arm of Hondo’s hoverchair and watched very closely. If Kyrie hadn’t already bought her a speeder of her own to tinker with, Obi-Wan thought, he didn’t know his son at all.

It was barely midmorning when they landed, and were welcomed by a smoothly professional droid which saw them to their rooms, extolled the amenities of the hotel, notified them that there would be a diving trip later in the day if they were interested, and - almost as an afterthought - that Lord Kyrie Theodora had arrived on planet and left a message with his location. Maré, already subdued and nervous, went white as a sheet.

“What the hell’s a  _ lord _ ,” she hissed to Katooni in Huttese, using the Basic word for the title. “It sounds fancy.”

“Your father only ever called himself a doctor or a Rebel,” Katooni said smoothly, in the same language but a much more comprehensible accent; Maré spoke such a deeply accented version of Huttese it was verging on dialect territory. “The title is probably mostly honorary - and likely included by the droid. Hotels of this kind like their guests to look important.”

Not that Kyrie and Limia were staying at the same hotel, but they were nearby, only half an hour across the lagoon. And all these hotels were connected - the same owners diversifying their portfolio by catering to different categories of guest.

“Would you like me to notify him of your arrival?” the droid continued smoothly. Maré shook her head definitely, and Hondo kindly took his cue from her.

The hotel was highly elegant, and the suite selected for them well adapted both to Hondo’s chair and to the cane he mostly used to get around. Katooni had her own room, though the plan was that she would spend as much of her time with Kyrie and Limia as Maré needed, and a small discreet alcove held a sofa bed that Maré could use if everything went horribly wrong. 

Obi-Wan felt his own nervous pangs.

There was still tidying and unpacking and organising to be done for Hondo, and to a certain extent for Katooni; much of it could be left to droids, but for the rest, Maré sat outside dangling her feet in the water, staring out into the endless sea, and fidgeting.

“Grandfather,” she said, eventually.

“Yes?” Obi-Wan said.

“Nothing. I just wanted to know you were still there.”

“I will stay with you,” Obi-Wan said, “until you feel safe without me. And if you need me, you need only ask.”

“Thank you,” said Maré, very softly, and watched her feet in the water. Little shoals of rainbow-coloured minnows played about her toes.

After a while, Katooni collected her and Hondo for the ride to Kyrie and Limia’s hotel. It was half an hour away on the waterspeeder the hotel graciously made available, and Maré spent all of it rigid with nerves.

“I have saved the best story for last,” Hondo said, beckoning to Maré as the speeder purred softly across turquoise water.

“What?” said Maré, understandably.

“Let me tell you,” Hondo said grandly, “of the day I captured Count Dooku, the terror of the Separatists! And also your respected grandsire, although in his case he should have been wiser than to let himself be overtaken by drink.”

“You spiked our drinks!” Obi-Wan exclaimed. Maré’s eyes darted in his direction.

“I did a great service to the Republic that day,” Hondo said nostalgically.

“Great service my  _ arse _ ,” Obi-Wan said, with disgust. Katooni snorted. Maré’s eyes flickered between them like she was watching a podrace.

“It was a fine day for salvage, many long years ago…” 

  
  


The suite was quiet, private; set on the edge of the hotel’s holdings, with a sheltered infinity pool before it, easy access to the lagoon, and a jetty on the other side. As Katooni brought the speeder curvetting round, Obi-Wan glimpsed a figure in navy-blue swimming trunks sitting on the edge of the swimming beach, long hair pulled into a careless knot at the crown of his head, talking to a figure wearing a flight-orange caftan. Even with Hondo’s story still meandering to its close, Maré went rigid.

Katooni drew up at the jetty. “Do you want us to come with you?”

“No,” Maré said, bright eyes frightened. “No, I want to - I’ll go alone.”

She disappeared into the suite - droid security let her pass - and Obi-Wan followed. It was simple; the kind of simplicity only wealth could afford. But for once Maré didn’t look to price furnishings or appliances; she left her bag at the door, complete with her prized X-wing pilot’s helmet, and walked straight through to the infinity pool and the swimming beach.  _ Be patient _ , Obi-Wan wanted to say, but of all the things he could not teach his son, that was one of them.

Kyrie and Limia were waiting - Kyrie, predictably, half into the water, and Limia a little closer to the door. They both smiled, but held their silence and their peace until Maré looked at her mother and said, “ _ Mamá _ ?”

“ _ Mijita _ ,” Limia rasped, hazel eyes bright with unshed tears, and fell to her knees with her arms wide open. “ _ Maré, preciosa _ -”

“We have missed you so much,” Kyrie said, sliding out of the water to wrap an almost overwhelming sense of love and security around his daughter, “Maré - Rey -” 

Maré hesitated for a single wavering second, and then ran forward into her parents’ arms. Obi-Wan faded backwards, out of the scene. 

Out in the speeder, Katooni raised a knowing eyebrow at him. “Think you’re a bit much, old man?”

Whatever respect she once felt for famous Master Kenobi vanished long ago. Obi-Wan did not regret it. “This reunion has been a long time in the making,” he said, and stepped backwards, into the sunlight.

  
  


Even old Obi-Wan was not there at dawn the next day, when Maré Flemín Theodora woke - restless, under the weight of her new names, and her new home, and her history - and went out onto the terrace. If Katooni knew, she slept regardless; and if Limia knew, she turned over in bed, and trusted her husband to keep their daughter safe.

Maré walked out onto the beach, and found her father pulling himself ashore, disentangling a mask and rebreather from his face, and fins from his feet. He smiled at her. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“I didn’t want to,” Maré said, looking at the pearly waters, the soft glow of the horizon.

“I love the sea,” Kyrie said. “You used to like swimming, when you were little. But there will have been more important things for you to know, in a desert.”

Maré murmured something ambiguous.

“The pool is seawater, if you would like to try,” Kyrie said, almost concealing hope behind politic dark eyes.

Maré nodded. Kyrie pushed his fins and rebreather aside and slipped into the pool. He held out his hands for her, and she stared at them. It was so strange to be offered help, but Katooni and Hondo and the others behaved as if it were not just normal but to be expected. And her parents seemed determined to live up to that.

Her grandfather had said that her father would want to teach her to swim.

“Come,” Kyrie said gently, “it’s not deep or cold.”

She slid into the water, neither cool nor warm, and grabbed for his hands. He caught her, and helped her turn onto her back, one hand cradling the back of her head, the other guiding her back.

“Breathe,” he said. “Let your arms and legs spread out - let your breath hold you up. It’s easier if your head falls back. See how the water is lifting you?” He pulled his hands gently away, so lightly Maré would hardly notice. “See? Open your eyes.”

Maré looked up into the silvery dawn.

“There,” Kyrie said with pride. “You’re floating.”

  
  



End file.
